Purpose And Meaning: Distinct Concepts

Purpose and meaning are two words casually and informally interchanged, as if they meant the same thing.  Yes, I understand that much of human language is purely arbitrary, shifting and without any inherent etymological definition.  Yes, concepts remain objective and fixed despite the flexibility and malleability of the languages used to capture them.  Yes, ultimately what matters most for my own pursuit of truth is that I understand concepts myself.  But I think that the concepts signified by the words "purpose" and "meaning" are actually quite different.

Suppose I create a teacup for myself.  As the creator of the cup, my purpose for it is to hold tea so I can drink out of it.  I objectively assigned the teacup a subjective personal purpose.  But there is not necessarily any significance to my action.  The teacup may have a purpose intended by me without the production or use of the teacup having any meaning or significance.  Perhaps another way of stating this is to say that in a nihilistic universe, a cosmos without any meaning whatsoever, my purpose for the teacup would still exist.  Of course, as I've mentioned, it doesn't follow at all that anything I've done is meaningful in any way--and yet my creation of the teacup did have an objective purpose.

Sometimes people seem to mean identical things when they say "I've finally found purpose" or "I have meaning in my life again".  Usually, it seems to me, they really mean that they have experienced subjective fulfillment and thus have declared whatever triggered that internal sensation to be something that contains purpose or meaning.  But, with the definitions I used above, the terms meaning and purpose are not synonymous, actually communicating very different concepts (and perceptions of fulfillment do not in themselves indicate the presence of objective meaning).

The Christian worldview harmonizes both concepts by holding both that God had an intended purpose behind the creation of the material world and everything contained in it and, by nature of God's metaphysical characteristics, meaning can be found in him and him alone.  This does not mean that nothing but prayer, church, and other directly spiritual activities has meaning, but that apart from the existence of God nothing can have any meaning--any significance--at all.  In the absence of God's existence, no ontological anchor for objective meaning exists, and therefore all human longings for meaning and subjective perceptions of meaning do not connect with any higher reality.  Of course, a fact hardly admitted by Christian apologists is that it does not follow from the logical fact that an uncaused cause (what I mean by God when I am not referring to the Christian Yahweh) exists that therefore meaning does.  But I'll save that for another time!  Until then, remember that purpose and meaning, although used interchangeably sometimes in informal language, can represent very different ideas.  Remember that precise language and consistent definitions matter!